Don’t be afraid, for I am with you. Do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you. I will help you. I will uphold you with my victorious right hand.
ISAIAH 41:10
Even though they didn’t realize it, visitors made my situation worse. They cared for me and wanted to express that concern. Because they cared, they did the most natural thing in the world—they visited my hospital room. That was the problem.
The constant flow in and out of my room exhausted me. I couldn’t just lie there and allow them to sit with me or talk at me. Maybe I needed to function in my role as pastor or felt some kind of obligation to entertain them. I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings by asking him or her to leave or not to come.
Many days, I smiled and chatted with them when all I really wanted to do was collapse. Sometimes the intense pain made it almost impossible for me to be a good host, but I still tried to be gracious. I kept reminding myself that they cared and had made an effort to see me.
Between friends, relatives, and church members, I felt as if a line stretched from the front door of the hospital to my room. Eva came in one afternoon and realized how much the visitors disturbed me. She chided me for allowing it.
I think she figured out that I wouldn’t tell anyone not to come back, so she asked the nursing staff to cut back on the number of visitors they allowed. It didn’t stop everyone from coming, but it did cut down the traffic in and out of the room.
Besides the pain and the flow of people in and out of my room, I lived in depression. A large part of it may have been the natural result of the trauma to my body and some of it may have been my reaction to the many drugs. I believe, however, that because I faced an unknown outcome and the pain never let up, I kept feeling I had little future to look forward to. Most of the time I didn’t want to live.
Why was I brought back from a perfect heaven to live a pain-filled life on earth? No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t enjoy living again; I wanted to go back to heaven.
Pain has become a way of life for me since the accident, as I am sure it has for many. It’s curious that we can learn to live with such conditions. Even now, on rare occasions when I am lying in bed after a good night’s sleep, I will suddenly notice that I don’t hurt anywhere. Only then am I reminded that I live in continuous pain the other twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes of each day.
It took a while for me to realize how profoundly my condition affected my emotions.
I prayed and others prayed with me, but a sense of despair began to set in. “Is it worth all this?” I asked several times every day.
The doctors and nurses kept trying to push medications on me for my depression, but I refused. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because I had so much medicine in me, I didn’t want any more. Besides, I didn’t think more medicine would do any good.
I wanted to be free from my miserable existence and die. Obviously, I felt wholly unequipped to deal with that turn of events. I now know that I was a textbook depression case.
Soon everyone else knew it too.
“Would you like to talk to a psychiatrist?” my doctor asked.
“No,” I said.
A few days later, one of the nurses asked, “Would you like me to call in a therapist? Someone you could talk to?”
My answer was the same.
Because I didn’t want to talk to anyone, what I called “stealth shrinks” began to creep into my room.
“I see you’ve been in a very severe accident,” one undercover psychiatrist said after reading my chart. He tried to get me to talk about how I felt.
“I don’t want to talk about the accident,” I said. The truth is, I couldn’t. How could I possibly explain to anyone what had happened to me during the ninety minutes I was gone from this earth? How could I find words to express the inexpressible? I didn’t know how to explain that I had literally gone to heaven. I was sure that if I started talking that way, he’d know I was crazy. He’d think something had gone dreadfully wrong with my mind, that I had hallucinated, or that I needed stronger drugs to take away my delusions. How could I put into words that I had had the most joyful, powerful experience of my life? How could I sound rational by saying I preferred to die? I knew what was waiting, but he didn’t.
I had no intention of talking to a psychiatrist (or anyone else) about what had happened to me. I saw that experience as something too intimate, too intense to share. As close as Eva and I are, I couldn’t even tell her at that time.
Going to heaven had been too sacred, too special. I felt that talking about my ninety minutes in heaven would defile those precious moments. I never doubted or questioned whether my trip to heaven had been real. That never troubled me. Everything had been so vivid and real, I couldn’t possibly deny it. No, the problem was I didn’t want to share that powerful experience with anyone.
That didn’t stop the psychiatrists from coming into my room and trying to help me. After a few times, they didn’t tell me they were psychiatrists. It’s humorous now, but the hospital psychiatrists were determined to help me. After I refused to talk to them, they would sneak into my room and observe me. Sometimes they came in while a nurse was working on me. Other times they came in and studied my chart and said nothing, and I assumed they expected me to start a conversation.
Often they’d walk in and say something like, “I’m Dr. Jones,” but nothing else. The doctor might check my pulse and ask, “How’s your stomach?” He’d examine my chart and ask pertinent questions. Eventually, he’d give himself away with a simple question such as “How do you feel today?”
“About the same.”
“How do you really feel about all of this?” No matter how they varied the routine, they always asked how I really felt.
“You’re a psychiatrist, aren’t you?” I’d ask.
“Well, uh, actually, yes.”
“Okay, what do you want to know? You want to know if I’m depressed? The answer is I’m very depressed. And I don’t want to talk about it.”
The conversations went on, but I’ve blotted most of them from my mind. Even though I knew Dr. Jones and the others were trying to help me, I didn’t believe there was any hope. I hated being depressed, but I didn’t know what to do about it.
The longer I lay in bed, the more convinced I became that I had nothing to look forward to. Heaven had been perfect—so beautiful and joyful. I wanted to be released from pain and go back.
“Why would anyone want to stay here after experiencing heaven?” I asked God. “Please, please take me back.”
I didn’t die, and I didn’t get over my depression.
I didn’t just refuse to talk to psychiatrists; I didn’t want to talk to anyone about anything. I didn’t want to see anyone. I would have been fine if no one visited me—or so I told myself.
In my depression, I just wanted to be left alone so I could die alone, without anyone trying to resuscitate me.
I also had enough pride as a professional and as a pastor that I didn’t want anyone to see how bad off I was. I don’t mean just the physical problems; I didn’t want them to know about my low emotional state either.
When people did get into the room to see me, of course, their words and gazes made me feel as if they were saying, “You’re the most pitiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
I guess I was.
And so the depression continued. It would be a long time before God would give me another miracle.
I was the father of three children, the husband of a wonderful wife, and until the accident, a man with a great future. I was thirty-eight years old when the accident happened and until then, the picture of health and in great physical shape. Within days after my accident, I knew I would never be that virile, healthy man again. Now I was utterly helpless. I couldn’t do anything for myself, not even lift my hand. Deep inside, I feared I would be helpless for the rest of my life.
As an example of my helplessness, I had not had a bowel movement for the first twelve days in the hospital. Knowing my system would turn septic, they gave me an enema, but that didn’t do much good.
I say “not much good” because I would pass a tiny amount and the nurse or nursing assistant would smile with delight.
One day I managed to squeeze out a tiny bit. “Oh, that’s so good. We’re so happy for you. Let’s wait. Maybe there’ll be more.”
In my depression, I’d think, This is the most pitiful experience in my life. I’m like a baby and everybody gets excited over a tiny bowel movement.
I don’t remember what I said to the nursing assistant, but I’m sure I wasn’t pleasant.
She left the room. That was one of those rare times when no one was visiting. I was totally alone and glad for the peace and quiet.
Within minutes after the nurse left, the enema took effect.
I exploded. I had the biggest bowel movement I’ve ever had in my life. The odor overwhelmed me.
In my panic, I clawed through the sheet and my fingers finally found the call button. Seconds later, the young nursing assistant raced into the room.
“I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to do this,” I said. “I’ll help you clean it up.” The words had no sooner left my mouth before I realized I couldn’t help her. I felt terrible, helpless, and loathsome.
I started to cry.
“No, no, no, don’t worry about a thing. We’re just so happy that you did it. This is good because it means your system is beginning to work again.”
In humiliation, I could only lie there and watch the poor young woman change everything. It must have taken her at least half an hour to clean up and then at least twice that long for the odor to vanish.
My embarrassment didn’t leave me, even though my mind tried to tell me differently. I had barely taken in any food for twelve days and this was a real breakthrough. I, however, could only think that this was one of the most embarrassing events in my life.
As awful as it seemed to me, more embarrassing, helpless experiences caught up with me. I had to have a urinal; I couldn’t wipe myself; I couldn’t shave. I couldn’t even wash my hair. They had to bring special devices to lay my head in and pour water over my hair and then drain it down a tube to a garbage can. In yet another act of incredible kindness, Carol Benefield, who had cut my hair for years, came to trim my hair several times while I was confined to my bed. For these sixty-mile round-trips, Carol would accept no money whatsoever.
Friends, family, and medical personnel found ways of providing for all of my physical needs, but I could only think of myself as being completely, utterly helpless. My right arm, the one that hadn’t been broken, had so many IVs in it that they had a piece of wood taped to me so I couldn’t bend the arm.
I had IVs everywhere. They ran into my chest and entered the tops of my feet. They lined up in a major tube that went directly to my heart through my chest. Many of my veins collapsed. I was so completely incapacitated they had to lift me off the bed with chains to change my bedding or do anything else that required moving me.
I was losing weight at an alarming rate, which scared the doctors. I just couldn’t eat anything and atrophy had set in. During the nearly four months I stayed in the hospital, I lost about sixty pounds. Before the accident I had weighed 210, and I got down to less than 150. The only way they could determine my weight was to put me in a sling like a baby to lift me up off the bed and weigh me. They tried to coax me into eating and tempted me by preparing my favorite foods, but nothing tasted good. Just the smell of food nauseated me. I had no appetite. I tried to eat, I really did, but I couldn’t handle more than a few bites.
I assumed that depression stopped me from eating, although I don’t know if that was the cause. I do know that when I tried, I couldn’t force myself to chew anything. I didn’t even want to swallow.
They attached me to a morphine pump they called a PC. Whenever the pain was really bad, I pushed a button to give myself a shot. I had to have pain medication constantly. At first I tried to resist taking more painkillers, but the doctor rebuked me for that. He said that my body was tensing from the pain and that retarded my healing.
At night they gave me additional medication to try to make me sleep. I write try because the additional medicine didn’t work. Nothing they did put me to sleep—not sleeping pills, pain shots, or additional morphine. I had no way to get comfortable or even to feel relieved enough from pain to relax.
I’ve tried to explain it by saying it this way: “Imagine yourself lying in bed, and you’ve got rods through your arms, wires through your legs, and you’re on your back. You can’t turn over. In fact, just to move your shoulder a quarter of an inch is impossible unless you reach up and grab what looks like a trapeze bar that hangs above your bed. Even the exertion to move a fraction of an inch sends daggers of pain all through your body. You are completely immobile.”
Because I began to break out with bedsores on my back due to being in one position too long, the hospital finally provided a special waterbed that constantly moved. That did take care of the bedsores.
The only time I ever left the room was when they wheeled me down to X-ray, which was always an adventure. Because of all the metal parts and equipment on me, they had trouble figuring out how to x-ray me. Three or four men wore lead suits in the X-ray room and held the lens and plates behind my steel-encased limbs, because no machine was designed to x-ray those types of things.
That also meant that some days I spent two or three hours in X-ray while the technicians tried to figure out how to take a picture so the doctors could see whether the bones were knitting. They had no precedent for a case such as mine.
When someone came to wheel me to X-ray, he’d always say, “We’re taking a trip down the hall.”
That was all they had to say, because I knew what they meant. To distract myself as the gurney cruised down the long hallways, I played a game of connect-the-dots with the ceiling tiles. I started that the day I came back from the first surgery. I was probably hallucinating, but I remember the ICU unit was brand-new, and I was the only patient. When they brought me in, I was moaning and couldn’t stop. Then I saw the ceiling tiles, and as I stared at them, it seemed as if they were running together and forming some kind of pattern that I couldn’t figure out. In my mind, I began making pictures and designs out of them. As I did that, I’d also think, I’m going completely crazy. But I did it anyway. Eventually, connecting the dots became a form of distraction allowing me to focus, if only momentarily, on something other than my pain.
The worst daily torment took place when a nurse cleaned the pinholes where the wires went into my skin. All the nurses that treated me on the orthopedic floor, the twenty-first floor of St. Luke’s Hospital, had to be taught how to clean those pinholes. Because they didn’t want the skin to adhere to the wire, they had to keep breaking the skin when it attached itself—as it did occasionally. Then the nurse forced hydrogen peroxide down each pinhole to prevent infection. I could think of nothing worse to endure, and it happened every day.
That wasn’t all. Four times a day, every six hours, they’d take an Allen wrench and turn screws on the device. The idea was that this would stretch the ends of the bones inside the leg and eventually cause the growing bone to replace the missing bone. The turn hurt beyond description, even though each turn was very slight, less than half a millimeter. It didn’t matter whether it was day or night, every six hours someone came into my room to turn the screws.
As a pastor, I had visited many hospital rooms, including trips to the ICU. I had seen agony on many faces, and I had frequently winced in sympathy. Even so, I couldn’t imagine anything on a day-to-day basis that could be more painful.
Perhaps the worst part for me was that I never slept. For eleven and a half months I never went to sleep—I just passed out. Even with megadoses of morphine, I was never pain free. When they decided it was time for me to go to sleep, a nurse injected me with three or four shots of either morphine or another sleeping medicine. I’d lie in bed, and no matter how much I told myself to relax, I couldn’t. I fought the pain and then, apparently, I passed out. My next conscious moment would be an awareness of intense pain. I felt nothing else in between.
Eventually, family members and even hospital personnel left me alone because they knew I didn’t have a functioning body clock. I had no sense of time, and I couldn’t relax, because I was under such tension. If I made the slightest effort to move, a wire embedded in my flesh would tear my skin at the point of entry. I could move, but the wires didn’t. With even the tiniest movement, excruciating pain slashed through my entire body.
After a while, I learned to live with that situation, but I never got used to it.
The first person I “met” (we never saw each other in person) for whom the Ilizarov frame was used for its original purpose was Christy. The Ilizarov procedure was created to lengthen bones for people born with congenital birth defects. However, the device could not be attached until the bones had stopped growing. Especially during adolescence, bones grow at a very rapid pace, so doctors must carefully choose the right time for the procedure.
Christy, a teenage girl, was in the room next to mine. She had been born with one leg shorter than the other. Once her bones had matured, she had chosen surgery to attach the Ilizarov frame to have her bones lengthened so that both legs would be of normal size.
Because Christy’s surgery was elective, she had some idea about the pain and the length of recovery she would have to go through. For months, she had gone through extensive counseling, and her family knew how to take care of the wounds. They also knew approximately how long it would take and the commitment they had to make to care for her.
The difference between Christy and me was that she knew what she was getting into—at least to the extent that anyone can. I woke up with the device already attached. In my depressed state, that made me feel even worse. Even though I knew they had put the Ilizarov frame on me to save my leg, I could only see it as the major source of my agony.
Another problem arose, although a minor one. Even though we had different doctors, the same staff people came into Christy’s room and mine to turn the screws. Sometimes the wrenches got misplaced, and the attendant couldn’t find them in my room so they’d rush over to Christy’s for hers. Or they’d come and borrow mine. Fortunately for both of us, our fixators were interchangeable and someone could borrow wrenches from one room to adjust screws in the other room.
That’s how I first learned about Christy—the borrowing of wrenches. We never saw each other face-to-face, but we did see each other’s doctor, and somehow that, plus our common problem, created a bond between us.
Christy and I shared something else—pain. Many times I heard her crying. I don’t mean weeping, but a cry, or a scream, and sometimes just a low moan. She probably heard similar sounds from my room as well. I wasn’t as likely to cry because that’s not my nature. One of the nurses suggested it might be better if I did let go and scream. Even though she may have been right, I never did—at least not consciously.
When I was in control of my faculties, I never cried out. I had heard others scream from their pain and their cries disturbed me greatly. Also, I had learned to keep my hurts and emotions to myself. I believed at that time that moans, wails, and screams did no good. The only times I screamed, I was either unconscious or heavily medicated. I learned about those outbursts because other people told me.
Although Christy and I never met during the twelve weeks we lived next door to each other, we corresponded by sending letters back and forth, and the nurses willingly acted as our mail carriers.
I tried to encourage Christy. She told me her story and was very sympathetic to my accident. She was also a believer. We corresponded on that level as well.
In some of my worst moments of self-pity, however, I would think that when all the pain was over, Christy would be a normal young woman; I would never be normal again. She could play and run and do everything a normal teen did. Even then I knew I would never run again.
I had many, many times of self-pity, reminding myself that she chose her pain, while I had no warning and no options. She knew in advance what she was getting into; I had no idea. She was doing something that positively impacted the rest of her life; I was doing something just to save my life. Yes, self-pity filled my mind many, many days.
Always, however, I came back to one thing: God had chosen to keep me alive. Even in my worst moments of depression and self-pity, I never forgot that.
Christy and I shared similar pain. We also shared a faith that reminded us that our loving God was with us in the most terrible moments of suffering. Just having her in the next room comforted me, because I’d think, I’m not the only one; somebody else understands how I feel.
That’s when I began to think of being part of an exclusive fraternity. In the years since my release, I’ve met other members of this reluctant and small fellowship. Because I knew what it felt like to suffer, I could understand their pain, just as Christy had felt mine and I had understood hers.
More than enduring, eventually I was able to do something doctors said I would never be able to do: I learned to walk again. I can stand on my own feet, put one foot in front of the other, and move.
They had warned me that because of the broken knee in my right leg, and the loss of the femur in my left (even with a replaced-and-stretched bone in place), I would not walk again, and if I did, I would be wearing heavy braces. More than once, I came close to losing my left leg, but somehow God took me through each crisis.
Therapy began on my arm about four weeks after the initial operation and on my legs two weeks after that.
About the same time, they put me in what I referred to as a Frankenstein bed. They strapped me to a large board and turned the bed so that my feet were on the floor and I was in a standing position, although still strapped to the bed. Two physical therapists placed a large belt around my waist and walked on either side of me. My legs had atrophied and grown extremely weak, so they helped me take my first steps. It took me days to learn to stand again so that I could put weight on my own legs. My equilibrium had changed because I had grown used to a horizontal position. I became incredibly nauseous each time they raised me into a vertical position. Days passed before I was used to that position enough to take my first step.
I didn’t really learn to walk until after the hospital discharged me. A physical therapist came in every other day to help me. Six months would pass before I learned to walk on my own more than a few steps.
My doctor removed the Ilizarov device eleven and a half months after the accident. After that, I could use a walker and eventually a cane. I didn’t walk without leg braces and a cane for a year and a half after the accident.
My accident occurred in January 1989. They removed the external metal work from my arm fixator in May, but they put internal metal plates down both of the bones of the forearm. Those metal plates stayed there for several more months.
In late November, they removed the fixator from my leg, but that wasn’t the end. After that, I remained in a cast for a long time, and they inserted a plate in my leg—which stayed there for nine years. I was content to leave it there, but they said they had to take it out. My doctor explained that as I aged, the bones, relying on the plate for strength, would become brittle. As I learned, our bones become and remain strong only as a result of tension and use.
During those years with the fixator and the subsequent metal plates, whenever I had to fly, I set off metal detectors from Ohio to California. Rather than go through the customary walk-through detector, I would say to the security people, “I have more stainless steel in me than your silverware drawer at home.”
They would wand me and smile. “You sure do.”
My children took pride in referring to me as “Robopreacher” after the title character in the movie Robocop. After a horrible incident, doctors used high technology and metal plates to restore the policeman so he could fight crime.
Regardless of how barbaric all these rods and wires and plates might have seemed, they worked. People gasped when they saw them embedded in my flesh. Those same people are now awed at my mobility. But under this thin veneer of normalcy, I’m still a work in progress, always adjusting.